October 28, 2015

To celebrate Halloween this month, some of our paranormal authors will be sharing with us some free fiction.

He only crawled out from under the bed when the screaming stopped.

It felt like it had lasted hours, but Tommy was pretty sure it had only been minutes. When it started, all he heard was thumps, but then some glass broke, and the screaming began. He didn’t know what was going on, but something bad. The terror was nearly paralyzing.

The silence after so much chaos seemed deafening and alien somehow. Every noise, from the scuff of his clothes against the carpet to the creak of the floorboards as he neared his door seemed shockingly loud. He thought it would bring the horror to him.

But despite the breathless minute he waited to be confronted by whatever evil was in the house, nothing came. Dare he hope he was safe? Could the guy have left?

It seemed like way too much to hope for, but Tommy decided to believe in it, if only to make the watery feeling in his stomach and legs go away. Still, he eased the door open, wincing when the hinge let out the slightest creak, but again, nothing manifested from the shadows. Tommy tiptoed out into the hall.

The house was quiet. Not even wind sighed in the eaves. It should have been comforting, but it was far from that. Right now he wanted noise, his mother or dad asking if everyone was okay, anything, but when you wanted something it never happened.

He found his sister first. She was face down on the floor of her room, in a pool of blood that the moonlight through the window turned black. But as he watched, something happened to her. Her body seemed to change shape, become smaller, become someone else. A child.

Tommy’s heart was trip hammering in his chest as he stumbled away from her room, not sure what he’d just seen. He came to his parent’s room, and his father was dead on the bed, his chest split wide open, blood turning the white sheets red. Mom was on the floor, a hole the size of a baseball blasted in her chest, her blood splattered over the mirrored closet doors. Tommy clapped a hand over his mouth to stop from sobbing, as his mother changed, becoming a woman with long, dark hair he’d never seen before. His dad was now gone from the bed, the sheets as crisp as freshly fallen snow.

He decided he was losing his mind when he recognized the woman on the floor. His wife.

What?

Tommy looked at his hands. He was what, seven? He wasn’t married …

Except he was. He had very clear memories of getting married to Becky, of being an adult. The child in his sister’s room, that was a boy, wasn’t it? His son, Jamie. What was going on?

Tommy looked in the mirror, and saw two different things. Himself as a child, in his cowboy pajamas, and him as an adult, blood splattered on his shirt and face, a gun in his hand. The adult him seemed to stare at him through the mirror. “You killed them all. And now you live here.”

He didn’t understand. How did this make sense? He didn’t do any of this.

Except he did, didn’t he? He now had a very clear memory of Becky threatening to leave him, and he got so mad. He wasn’t thinking straight. He just saw red. And his gun was right there …

No! He wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t …

He saw his adult self in the mirror, pressing the hot muzzle of his gun to his temple. He could feel the skin burning on his face. “You will always live here.” For a single moment, he thought he could see through himself, to another room. A different room, one free of corpses and blood, but one where he was barely an afterthought. And yet, he was still there.

Tommy understood then that he was always here. He was always stuck in this moment, in this place, in this act. No matter how he tried to escape, how he tried to will himself into another time, another memory, he was always trapped here. He did the worst thing anyone could ever do, and now he would live with it forever.

Tommy pulled the trigger, and his consciousness was obliterated in a loud blast of darkness.

When the screams woke Tommy once more, he screamed right along with them.